


a seven nation army couldn't hold me back

by erebones



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Backstory, Everybody Lives, Jedha, M/M, POV Bodhi Rook, spiritassassin 2017 exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-30
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-10-13 00:06:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10502304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erebones/pseuds/erebones
Summary: Rumors abound in the city of Jedha of another kind of Guardian, selected by the will of the Force to be the last-stop defense of the Kyber Temple. They are feral and unpredictable, prone to wander the streets on nights when the surface of NaJedha is cast into darkness, feasting on the flesh of the wicked. They are used as stories to scare children into good behavior, and tossed around as casual threats even among adults.Initiates at the Temple are told that these are just idle fancies, with no basis in fact. This is a lie.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rockcandyshrike](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rockcandyshrike/gifts).



> So this is a spiritassassin fic... almost completely from the perspective of Bodhi. lmao. Hopefully this fulfills your request, I had a lot of fun writing it!
> 
> For lionmettled's prompt: Monster AU where Baze and Chirrut are two terrifying very happily married creatures of the night who seem perfectly human unless they're feeding or something happens to cause one to *snap*. Preferable if neither were the usual werewolves, vampires, etc.
> 
> warning for a very oblique reference to attempted teen prostitution and general parental negligence.

Bodhi was born and raised on Jedha—he knows its stories. Its secrets. As a boy running ragged through the sandy streets, barefoot and bloody-nosed more often than not, he learned what any child learns when they’re raised by a city’s bones: how to stay alive. How to pick pockets, how to slip down alleys and gutterways to disappear. How to read the energy of the marketplace and the trading posts for the best haul. He knew when to stand up for a brother or sister, and when to keep his mouth shut. He knew how to hide, how to lie, how to take a beating. He knew _Jedha_. 

He lived in the lowest corners of the city, where the walls buckled and grew rot, where people built their ramshackle shelters in the holes of the city’s underbelly. He was lucky, perhaps, to live in the gutted innards of an old apartment, with enough people packed inside to keep the bitter cold of Jedha’s winters out. He rarely felt lucky. 

But there was a roof, mostly, and food sometimes (what he did not steal for himself), and his siblings all piled together to sleep where they fell, exhausted from their roughhousing and petty crime. His parents bickered constantly, when they were both there at all, but it was a home. A home with twelve other families, of varying sizes and ages, all scraping by together in their own ways. 

From this vantage point, the city’s crown jewel seemed light years away. Bodhi has been as far as the market square outside the Temple gates, but only on festivals, and only for the chance to pick a pocket worth his weight in credits. He has never been inside the Temple, or seen a real monk—only the acolytes, the junior ranks out in the streets doing their good deeds or taking the main road out of the city for pilgrimage. Has slipped his hand inside a robe or two for a coin purse, and once or twice been caught.

The first time it was an older acolyte, on the cusp of full Guardianship: a twi’lek woman, her head swathed in dark fabric and her face smudged with kohl for penitence. She clucked her tongue at him, twisted his ear gently, and sent him on his way with a five-credit for his trouble. It kept his family in rice and _ghazja_ for two weeks. 

The second time he was not so lucky. A brash, impatient acolyte with a gold cord around his waist and an air of self-importance had grabbed his wrist before he even knew he’d been caught, dragged him into the center of the street for a public dressing-down. He’d cuffed him soundly about the ears and berated him loudly in front of everyone, and then gave him a hefty kick for good measure that sent him scurrying, drowning in humiliation and the sting of an unexpected beating. 

When he found his way home, his mother was too busy entertaining a _visitor_ to have any sympathy, and so he crawled into an unoccupied corner to mope. But he did not go unnoticed for long. 

“I can hear you sniffling, boy. Come, come. Tell me your troubles.”

Bodhi sat and glared. “I’m not a baby,” he said with scorn, although he was hardly more than seven years old, and the youngest of his six siblings. “And I’m not _sniffling_.”

The old man just smiled. He was sitting on the floor, too, protected from the cold stone by a collection of old rice sacks that he used in lieu of blankets. He was the only occupant with no family or anyone else to look after, and as such, he looked out for all of them. Well. He didn’t really _look_ anywhere—his left eye was missing, through some misadventure that seemed to change with each retelling, and his right was clouded by cataracts, letting him see only shapes and shadows. He was _ápi_ , grandpapa, to most of the children there, but Bodhi had once seen him beat up a would-be thief with nothing more than his walking stick and his gnarled fists, and he wasn’t sure what to make of him. _Grandpa Juji_ , he thought—grandpa demon—and stayed away. 

“Are you afraid of me?” the old man inquired. He did not sound upset about it. When Bodhi didn’t answer right away, he tapped the floor with his stick and says, “Come. Sit with an old man a while. I promise I won’t bite.”

Common sense gave way to a boyish desire for comfort, and Bodhi reluctantly scooted across the floor to sit crosslegged facing him. The old man smiled, his entire face folding up like crumpled paper. 

“You are a good boy, Bodhi—it is Bodhi, isn’t it?”

“Yes, master,” Bodhi said, wanting to be polite. He had never been called _good boy_ before, and already Grandpa Juji was looking less like a fearsome creature and more like a friend. 

“Have you run into trouble today?”

“A little,” he admitted. He rubbed his head where the acolyte had cuffed him. His ear still throbbed, and his ribs were sure to bruise by morning, but he had walked away from worse. “A monk hit me in the street today.”

The old man clucked his tongue. “And what gave him reason to do so?”

Bodhi buried his face in his knees and scowled hard enough to bare his teeth. “Fishin’.”

“Mm. So he was provoked, but not justified. Let me see, little man.”

Bodhi jerked away on instinct from the man’s searching hands. Like claws, he thought, but the old man turned them palm-up and did not reach for him. “What for?” 

“If you are injured, we should do something about it.”

“I’m not injured,” Bodhi insisted, but he reached out and touched one old hand anyway. 

The man cradled his head in his hands without speaking. His palms were rough with callouses, but his touch was gentle, and Bodhi did not flinch away when he touched his tender ears or his scraped cheek where the acolyte had pushed him to the ground. 

“You’ll be all right,” he said at last. “But you should not trouble the Guardians, young Bodhi. The quiet ones have teeth.”

Bodhi snorted, emboldened by his care. “They’re all soft. I just gotta be quicker.”

The old man’s face grew smooth and serene. “If you think the Guardians are soft, boy, you will be greatly disappointed one day, and there will be no one to save your hide. Have you not heard the stories?”

“Of course I have,” he said, even though he wasn’t sure what stories he meant. There were plenty of stories about the Guardians, some good, some bad—almost all of them superstitious. It depended on the teller. “Buncha crazies living up in the Temple, humming and bowing to some hunk of rock. Sounds daft to me.”

But the old man did not laugh. “Listen well, boy. I know tales of the Guardians that would make your hair stand on end. If you do not treat them with respect, they have ways of rooting you out.”

“How?” Bodhi demanded, still impetuous but starting to feel the creep of doubt. He was so serious, Grandpa Juji was. Bodhi was not a gullible boy, but something about the old man’s face rang of truth. 

“A normal Guardian is bad enough. Have you seen them fight? No?” He cracked a rusty laugh. “Have you seen _me_ fight?”

Bodhi went stiff all over and eyed the weathered walking stick laying across the man’s lap. “Yes.”

“Just think,” the old man tapped his nose, “I did not even finish my training. Imagine what a full Guardian could do, let alone… well. Perhaps that story is too frightening for young ears, and I should save it for another day.”

“No, tell me!” Bodhi exclaimed, suddenly aflame with curiosity. “You were a monk? What story? I want to hear it, I promise I won’t interrupt!”

The old man cracked a weary smile. “Yes, I was once an acolyte. In my youth I trained under the Guardians, and hoped to be one myself someday, but I did not make it even to the fifth duan—forgive me, the fifth level of skill. There are seven. But during my fourth, I lost my way and I left the order. But that is not important. 

“When I was at the Temple, there were stories passed around the lower dormitories—rumors of the _jihunn_ , the demons. Dark figures wreathed in silence, deadly immortal beings that defend the Whills wherever the Force reaches.” His voice, old and cracked, fell into a cavernous rumble that Bodhi felt in his bones. He wrapped his arms around his legs and shivered. “The Grandmasters will insist that these stories are foundless, but keep your ears open and you will hear of them. They walk among us like sheep. Soft outer shells, no more dangerous on the surface than the Guardians that watch over the Temple. Masters of martial arts, yes, speakers of the Whills, but normal men. Mortals.” The old man leaned forward, and Bodhi stared into his one cloudy eye, paralyzed. “They are not mere mortals, boy. They are swift and deadly hunters, and their only cause is the will of the Force—inscrutable, unknowable. So best be on your good behavior around them, or you’ll feel their bite.”

Bodhi gulped and scrambled to find his voice. When it finally emerged, it was not as steady as he would have liked, but he still manages to squeak out, “Are there lots?”

The old man sat back, and it felt as if the gravid shadow of NiJedha had suddenly moved away from the sun—the tension cleared, and Bodhi’s limbs relaxed minutely. “No. No, there are very few of the _jihunn_ left.” He sighed and rubbed his weathered forehead. “To be chosen by the Whills for such a task is a great honor, but a difficult one. _Jihunn_ are given certain powers—speed, agility, dark-vision, strength—but with such powers come a price. You would do well to treat the Guardians and the Temple with respect, boy. Just to be safe.”

“What price?” Bodhi whispered, but the old man only shook his head. 

“That is enough of such talk. Just mind your manners, and pay your respects on festival days, and the _jihunn_ will have no reason to seek you out.”

///

That was the first time he heard the story of the _jihunn_ , but it was not the last. Now that the seed has been planted, the story follows him like a bad luck token, resurfacing when he least expects it. 

He is ten, sitting on the wall after festival, drinking something strong and foul out of his brother’s flask while the older kids talk about the procession and the monks with their clay masks painted to frighten away demons. “They were all _jihunn_ today,” someone says, and they all laugh, shoving at each other goodnaturedly and pulling horrible faces. “Better keep quiet or they’ll hunt you down and cut out your heart!”

/

He is twelve and a half, listening to his mother screaming at Lisha when she refuses to help entertain a prospective client. He pulls the covers over his head and whispers to Ahnan that he wishes that their mami would leave and never come back. 

Ahnan hits him until he fights free of the blankets and goes to hunker by himself against the wall. “Shut up! Shut up, you _ghab_ , do you want the demons to come and kill us all? Do you know what they do to wicked little boys like you?” He grabs Bodhi by the collar and shakes him until his teeth rattle. “They’re gonna _eat you up_ , munch on you while you’re still alive, and spit out your bones after for Mami to find in the morning.”

Bodhi is saved from further knock-abouts when Kiki complains about the noise and makes them all lie down again, but he doesn’t sleep that night. Instead he lies awake and shivers, and wonders if the _jihunn_ heard him after all. Wonders if they’ll come steal him away while his siblings sleep around him and devour his body for his sinfulness. 

/

He is fourteen and he can’t sleep. The backs of his hands hurt from being whipped by a shopkeeper who caught him trying to nick some fruit—he is getting bonier and ganglier as he grows, and it is harder to be quick and invisible—and there is not enough room on the mattress anymore for all of them, so he’s taking his turn on the floor. The blanket isn’t really enough for comfort. Even when he folds his knees up and wedges his back against the wall, the room feels too big, too cold, without the warmth and muffled snores of his brothers and sisters all around him. 

Sometime after midnight he gives up and slips outside. The street is empty and narrow, and the decaying buildings lean close together overhead, but there is enough of a sliver of sky left for him to count stars. He sits on the stoop and tilts his head back, eyes half-closed, the blanket around his shoulders and his bare feet curling in the dirt absently as he waits to feel tired. 

And then. At the end of the narrow lane, a shadow. He squints through the dark, but can’t make out any defining features. Just a long drape of black fabric and a walking stick, sweeping back and forth across the street without a sound. Fear strikes through him like lightning through a rod for no reason he can explain, and he hunches back further on the step, hands turned to claws around his ankles. _Don’t turn this way_ , he thought desperately. _Go on. Keep walking. Force, please…!_

He doesn’t know why he’s so afraid, it makes no sense. Grandpa Demon has taught him how to throw a punch, if it even comes to that—the door is right at his back, easy enough to yank open and slip through, and only an idiot would follow him there into a house full of people. 

And yet he doesn’t move. Paralyzed by fear or morbid curiosity, he stays crouched in the lee of the building and watches the figure move down the street toward him. The staff whispers back and forth, hardly touching the stone. _It’s just a blind old man looking for a place to sleep_ , he tells himself, but he can’t quite make himself believe it. The blood is pounding in his ears, and he’s sweating even though the night is chill; with each step, the figure draws closer, and Bodhi’s head rings until he realizes he’s been holding his breath. 

The figure is only a smudge in the murk two houses down when Bodhi breaks. Without taking his eyes from it, he reaches back and up, fiddling the latch until it pops open and he can bundle himself inside. He was quiet about it—he knows how to be quiet—but he can’t shake the feeling that something has its eyes on him. Something bad. 

The lower floor of the building is dark. Only the faint glow of Jedha City streaming through the slatted blinds illuminates the bare floors, the door crooked in its frame. Curtains separate the rest of the house from the front door, but Bodhi feels as if he’s million miles away from any other living soul. With his heart in his throat, he gets down on his belly and wriggles toward the door in perfect silence—the only thing he can hear is his own breath, rasping softly in and out, and the low drone of someone snoring in another room. 

The front door is ancient, solid wood worn with centuries of sand; it doesn’t sit quite right against the threshold, and near the corner is a sliver of night sky where the aged wood split long ago. Bodhi leans his forehead against the door and peers out. All he sees is an empty street. 

Something thuds against the door and Bodhi yelps. He may have even wet himself a little, but he’s too terrified to check. He holds perfectly still, not even breathing, as something drags against the other side of the door. An open hand? A claw? The end of a wooden staff? He swallows hard and tries to crane his neck to see, but the gap is too narrow and the angle too sharp to make anything out apart from the shadowy street. 

Then, with no warning, an eye appears in the crack: round and white, reflecting silvery light back at him like the eyes of a cat peering from the dark. He can see no lid or pupil, just the eye, unblinking. 

After the initial shock he feels his body go into lockdown: every muscle feels as solid as the bedrock that Jedha is built on, and his last breath is still frozen in his chest, refusing to exhale. He quivers, staring back, and a strange calm falls over him—the calm of an animal being stalked by the hunter, resigned to its fate. He is going to die here, face-down on the floor, and the _jihunn_ ’s bloodlust will be satisfied. 

The eye blinks and the spell is broken. Bodhi breaks from his trance with a yelp and scurries backward on hands and knees before stumbling upright and bolting upstairs. The ladder shakes as he tears up it, and he burrows under his blanket and squeezes his eyes shut tight as he waits for something awful to tear him apart. 

But nothing does. It takes a long while, but eventually his heartbeat calms and his breath stops puffing in and out so horribly. With a great deal of care, he creeps across the floor past his sleeping siblings, and peers out the window. 

The street is empty. Everything seems brighter, now, bathed in the serene glow of NaJedha’s bulk, and there’s no sign of the _jihunn_. Bodhi shuts his eyes and breathes. 

_You just imagined it_ , he tells himself. _It was a dream. A nightmare_. 

But as hard as he tries, he can’t quite make himself believe it. 

/

He’s seventeen and he’s leaving home for good, probably. Jedha is under Imperial occupation. Kiki was shot in the middle of the market square when she got caught in the crossfire between rebels and stormtroopers, and Bodhi has had enough. He wants a life away from the endless grit and sand, away from the constant grasping hands of hunger and fear. Maybe he has a few outstanding debts, maybe he’s running away. But he’s a betting man, and it’s clear even from the view down here that the Empire is going to come out of this on top. Better to be up there where it counts than grovelling down here, eking out a life that won’t mean jack shit when the city finally falls. 

Bodhi Rook, cargo pilot. 

It doesn’t come easy. He’s put through rigorous testing to determine the best placement, but it’s no kind of testing he’s ever heard of before. When he comes out on the other side, a masked Imperial underling shoves his new uniform into his sweaty, shaking hands, and tells him where to go for his identification badge. 

Halfway there, he has to step into a refresher and sit on the toilet with his head between his knees, quivering. He thinks about being a child, when the most terrifying thing he’d ever faced was a half-imagined monster from a fairy tale, and he laughs until he chokes on it. It’s hard to be afraid of stories when real life is so much worse. 

A few years in, when he’s lonely and afraid, sick with the knowledge that he’s chosen the wrong side, he finds himself telling the stories of his home planet to a man he’d never thought would look at him twice: Galen Erso. A brilliant mind, but a sad one. They see the same sadness in each other, Bodhi thinks. The same loss. 

He tells him about the _jihunn_ , and the face he saw behind the crack in the door, and somehow it’s funny now—Galen laughs, and Bodhi grins, amused at his own hyperactive imagination. 

“They sound quite terrifying, these _jihunn_ ,” Galen says. His pronunciation is somewhat lacking, but Bodhi has the good grace not to say anything about it. 

“They are. If you believe they’re real, of course.”

“Of course,” Galen says solemnly, with a bit of a twinkle in his eye. 

Bodhi thinks to himself, as Galen dismisses him with a salute and a kind expression, that he would do anything for this man. Even if his life is a wreck, his loyalties in shreds, his honor pounded into cold space dust by the crushing weight of the Empire, Erso is a cause he can believe in. 

/

Bodhi Rook is erased the day he finds Saw. He didn’t think he could feel true fear, anymore, but then he does, and then there is nothing. 

He doesn’t really come back to himself until he’s sitting in the belly of an Alliance vessel, watching through the window as his home city turns to dust. Everyone is silent except the pilot and the droid. The girl, Galen’s daughter, is tight-lipped and sharp-eyed, clinging to the overhead straps like her life depends on it. She must look like her mother, Bodhi thinks nonsensically—and what else can he think about, when the city that raised him has just been obliterated? He thinks of the alleys he once knew so well, his too-big too-loud family, the markets with their stalls and vendors, the Temple standing over all of it like a distant but benevolent guardian. 

Guardian. They snap into hyperspace, sending them all pitching where they sit or stand, but the Guardian and his bodyguard (mercenary?) don’t seem to feel the shock of it. Of the two of them, it’s the merc that makes Bodhi nervous. But then the Guardian lifts his head, eyes turned toward the ceiling, and Bodhi’s blood runs cold. Those eyes are pale blue, unseeing, but at think angle they seem to glow just slightly, as if the light they caught was being reflected back. Cat’s eyes. _Jihunn_ eyes. Bodhi ducks his head in his arms and shivers. 

“Baze, tell me… all of it? The whole city?”

Silence. No one dares reply.

“ _Tell_ _me_.”

“All of it,” the merc growls, so harshly that Bodhi flinches and feels the sudden, irredeemable ache of that truth in his chest. He covers his mouth and presses his hand hard against his teeth to suppress the scream that wants to bubble out. 

_An unfortunate side-effect is that one… tends to lose one’s mind._

He doesn’t know if he can blame this feeling on the Bor Gullet: intense, frantic sorrow bubbling into paranoia, the unshakable feeling that he’s being watched. It’s a feeling he had grown accustomed to as a cargo pilot—the Empire has eyes everywhere. But this is a different feeling. 

He glances up, and the merc is looking at him, face inscrutable. He doesn’t seem to care that he’s been caught; he examines Bodhi a little longer and then grunts and turns away, apparently satisfied. 

The Guardian lets out a ragged sigh and leans forward, resting his head on the merc’s shoulder. “Baze…”

Baze doesn’t reply with words, but emotion etches itself into the lines on his face. He looks brittle, suddenly, like bone pottery about to break. He looks like Grandpa Juji did the day Bodhi told him he was leaving. 

_You walk a dark path, young man. May you follow it with care, and come out whole on the other side._

Bodhi doesn’t know if he’s whole, exactly, but he’s here, and that’s half the battle. 

///

“Do you think the boy knows?”

“The boy?” Chirrut parrots, almost mockingly, as if he isn’t perfectly aware of who Baze refers to. 

“ _Bodhi_ ,” he growls. On the other side of the small vessel, the boy in question shivers in his sleep. Baze doesn’t think he’ll ever sleep again, but the boy—Bodhi—is clearly exhausted, and his recent misadventures have finally caught up with him. He rests against the stripped metal hull without blanket or covering, just curled up like a rat in a trap, his Imperial uniform turned a muddy fawn color with Jedha’s dust and Eadu’s icy rain. Baze shuts his eyes and leans his head back. “Do you think he knows? About us?”

Chirrut hums inscrutably and taps his staff on the floor. He doesn’t seem on the verge of reply, so Baze takes the time to study him. His face is smooth and serene, thoughts turned inward, almost as if in meditation—but he is not meditating. He is communing with the Force. It’s a skill that came particularly easy to him when they were children, a knack that advanced him quickly through the ranks. Baze has never been as attuned, but what he lacked in natural ability he made up for with sheer grit and determination. When they reached their seventh duan together, shoulder to shoulder, the Grandmasters gave them equal accolades, but said that perhaps Baze’s achievements were more noteworthy for all his strivings. 

Today it doesn’t much matter. Today the Grandmasters are dead, and the shell of the Temple that Baze once loved is gone. The city he grew up in is gone. The city he ran in as a wild hellion boy, the city he watched over as a Guardian, the city he keep safe on dark nights when the Force beat wildly from a wicked place and called to his blood for retribution. Gone. 

“He does not know,” Chirrut says suddenly, a little too loudly. Jyn lifts her head from where she sits, jerked from her grief by the unexpected words; on the other side of the narrow space, Bodhi startles awake but stays curled up, eyes flicking here and there as he wraps his arms around himself and holds tight. 

“Quietly,” Baze murmurs in Jedhan, softly. Bodhi’s eyes steal toward them, black and wide like the void of space. 

“He does not know,” Chirrut repeats in a whisper, “but he suspects.”

Baze stills the twitch in his hand that wants to reach for his blaster. “Is he a danger?”

“To us?” He breathes a silent laugh and continues in Jedhan. Whatever brief curiosity Jyn had had is gone, and she turns away. “My dear, he is hardly a threat to a fly in his present state. Saw’s beast has been at him, can you not tell?”

The boy shouldn’t be able to hear them, not with how softly Chirrut speaks, but he hunches in on himself anyway, like an animal cowering in a trap. Baze deliberately turns his back on him. 

“You dislike him,” Chirrut says. 

“There is a difference between _dislike_ and _distrust_.” He subsides in his argument and smiles when he feels Chirrut creep one hand forward to hold his arm. “But if you trust him, then I suppose I must go along.”

“You have intuition of your own, Baze. Do you no longer trust it?”

Baze grunts. “You know the answer to that question.” 

There’s a sudden rattle of metal as someone comes down the ladder in a hurry. Cassian drops to the floor and gives them a nod. “We’re coming in. They’ll want a debrief from all of us before Jyn makes her report—I’ll make sure the three of you go in together.”

Bodhi draws himself up to stand, thin and trembling, dragging the shreds of his pride around him like a tattered cloak. “I can go on my own, it’s all right. I know I’m—” His eyes dart across the cargo bay to where Chirrut sits calmly, staff planted on the floor between his feet. “I know I’m a d-defector.”

“You’re not dangerous,” Jyn snaps, rousing from her grief for the first time since her shouting match with the captain. She levels a look at Cassian. “Put him with me.”

“He’s of Jedha—”

“Put him with me,” she repeats, riding over Cassian’s brittle attempt at logic. 

Baze says nothing, lets them work it out on their own as the vessel starts to rattle through the stratosphere. He knows the look on Bodhi’s face—has seen it before many times during his years as a Guardian. The constant glimpses from the corners of his eyes. The way he can’t seem to entirely turn his back on them. Jyn and Cassian and the droid aren’t afraid, because they don’t know what it means to serve the Whills, what it means to wear those robes and pledge the ultimate vow of fealty. 

But Cassian is right—Bodhi is of Jedha. He sees Baze and Chirrut for what they are, and he is terrified.

/

Chirrut isn’t used to this—working as part of a team. (In his mind, Baze is not a _team_. Baze is an extension of himself, in every way that counts. He and Baze haven’t been separate people for decades.)

As a Guardian, you learn early on how to function as a moving piece in the great turning wheel of the Temple. He had found a home there, in the fold, but when he took his vows and spilled his blood in service to the Whills, when he took on the dark and difficult path of _jihunn_ , he learned to walk another way. A lonely way. Here on this sandy beach, relying on the will and firepower of other men and women, of _strangers_ , is a hard thing to accept.

He tastes fire on his tongue, hard on the heels of his bowcaster, and Baze clamps a hand on his shoulder like a vise. “Stop that,” he mutters, before hoisting his cannon onto his shoulder and firing into the sea. Water sprays up—a handful of stormtroopers go flying and lie still. 

“I can’t help it.” His voice is crackled and deeper in his own ears, like he’s been smoking from a _jacca_ pipe in the back of some seedy watering hole. “They’re going to need this, Baze, before the end. They’re going to need _us_.”

“Yeah, well.” The ground beneath them shakes, and they duck as molten-hot sand sprays up. Reinforcements. “Let’s not scare off the volunteers until we have to, eh?”

The volunteers, unfortunately, are dropping like flies. The heat of the sun and the sand bleaches a lot of Chirrut’s perception away, leaving him tethered in the dark to the echo box and sound of Baze’s voice, but it’s hard to mistake the smell of blood. Chirrut isn’t exactly sure how many they started with—everyone’s heartbeats seemed doubled in the narrow metal belly of the stolen Imperial vessel, but he’s fairly sure Cassian’s estimate of ten had been an understatement—but as they crash through the underbrush, fan-bladed leaves whipping him in the face, he can feel six, maybe seven people hard on their heels. The others might still be alive, spreading across the island like flies on an anthill, but it hardly matters now. The end is coming soon. 

He remembers vividly the day he swore himself to the Whills. He had stood alone in the vast desert, stripped to his undergarments, the winds whipping around him as the desert fought him for the gift of his body. Many Guardians had been swallowed up in its depths before, judged unworthy before the frightening power of the Force, but Chirrut was not afraid. He closed his sightless eyes, a thin kyber blade singing in his hand, and laughed. 

He isn’t laughing now, though the grit of sand between his teeth is the same. He wipes sweat off his forehead before the sting of it can reach his eyes and reaches out through the Force. 

“Two coming on your left,” Baze shouts, but his voice is drowned out by the song of his bowcaster. _Thrummmm. Thrummmmm._ Two more heartbeats wink out. The blood inside his body feels set aflame, tearing beneath his skin, screaming to get out—but not yet. Not yet. 

The first thing an acolyte learns upon admission to the Temple is patience. Second, focus. As a young man, Chirrut could stand on one leg, balanced like a sand crane, for days at a time. Had done, in fact, just to prove a point, and then had spent two more days in the infirmary with leg cramps that refused to let him walk. Baze had sat with him the whole time, lambasting him for his idiocy. 

But it didn’t matter. Chirrut had _won_. He was stronger and faster than many of his peers, yes, but he was more proud of his patience. He had waited his opponent out then, and he had waited in meditation for the Whills to reveal themselves to him. He could wait now, even though it hurt. He rubs his chest over his robes. In spite of the layers, he can feel the jagged scar on the left side of his breast, thick and ropey even after all these years. When he presses it, he fancies he can feel a shadow of the old pain as he sank his kyber blade deeply into his heart and bled out into the Jedhan sand. It is the Force that keeps him alive now, he and Baze both, pumping their blood through their veins and flooding their bodies with unnatural strength and speed. Even if Baze has turned his back on the Whills, he cannot shake that truth. Their bodies are vessels of the Force, and they will service it as long as it requires and no longer. 

“I can hear you thinking,” Baze growls. There is a lull, for the moment. All their immediate enemies lie dead and smoking on the sand, and they can hear explosions going off on other parts of the island, the whistle of enemy fighters screaming overhead. Chirrut tilts his head back against the tree upon whose roots he sits, and smiles. 

“Does it bother you, to feel my memories?”

“You know it does.” Baze had made that sacrifice, too, annihilating his mortal flesh to serve the Whills in a way that so few can. But he doesn’t like to remember it. 

“I can feel it coming, soon.” Chirrut grips his lightbow and ignores the nervous shifting of the men around them. “We cannot hide forever.”

“Not yet.” Baze hefts his gun over his shoulder and makes the _move-out_ sign with his hand. Even in the heat, Chirrut can sense it, but he has always been able to feel Baze more keenly than anyone or anything else. “Not yet, Chirrut.”

The beast in Chirrut wants out, but Baze is right. Now is not the time. 

He will wait. 

/

Bodhi’s palms are sweating. All of him is sweating, really—Jedha was sandy, but it was never this bloody _hot_ —but his palms catch his attention most of all. Cold and clammy, in spite of the heat that wraps around him like a constricting blanket, like cotton stuffed into his lungs. Explosions rock the ship, and he stumbles against the wall. When his vision clears, he peers out of the hatch and feels his stomach drop. 

Chirrut is out in the open, walking. His lightbow is nowhere to be seen, but he wields his staff like a walking stick, leaning heavily on it as it sinks into the sand with every step. Blasters fire all around him--Bodhi can see the streaks of heat they leave behind, smell the singe and crackle. But nothing lands. Nothing hits. Chirrut moves through the firestorm untouched. When Bodhi crawls forward on his stomach and squints, he can just make out the waver and shift of the air around his body, the way it seems to fold around him like an invisible shield. Dry-mouthed, Bodhi pants for breath and prays. 

Chirrut’s hand is on the switch. He lifts his staff, and the sun catches in the kyber at its tip, winking like a homing beacon, blinding. Bodhi ducks his head and feels the chill of its brightness wash over him. 

The sounds of battle seem to slow. Blasters still fire at a near-constant clip, and the ground shakes as an AT-ACT stalks them somewhere out of Bodhi’s line of sight, but all of it is dulled, drowned by a swollen bubble of silence that blasts outward from Chirrut’s form. His black and scarlet robes whip around his legs, and the sand beneath his feet begins to rise, like Chirrut is the eye of a very small, localized storm. Bodhi’s flight goggles came off some time ago, so he squints through his fingers against the brightness, unable to look away as Chirrut… _changes._

It’s not that he becomes something else. He still retains his human shape and form. But it’s like a very thin veil has been peeled away, a pretty surface-level painting torn to show the darkness underneath. Chirrut’s white-blue eyes flame in his dirty face, his teeth are bared and flashing against the red slash of his mouth as he sinks forward, knees bent in a ready stance, and sweeps one hand through the air in front of him. 

The ground at his feet _ripples_ \--like an ocean wave, like something is _beneath_ the sand--and spreads outward, rippling, grating, tearing into chunks and flying up like an earthen tidal wave that hits the stormtroopers head-on. White body armor and blasters go flying. Vaguely, through the popping in his eardrums, he can hear screaming. 

Another hand wave, another invisible force rippling over the sand. Chirrut plants his staff between his feet, deeply, and bows his head as if in concentration. Through the hot white of the scene before him, Bodhi can make out a vague, shimmering glow that seems to emanate from Chirrut’s body. Like a heat mirage it lifts off his shoulders, his bowed head--and then he drives his staff deeper and something… cracks. 

There’s a scream of sheared metal and a dull, violent implosion, and an AT-ACT sinks to his knees just inches from Chirrut’s face, rocking the whole beach like an earthquake. Bodhi had heard it even if he hadn’t seen it, but it’s _this_ he can’t believe--Baze emerging from the smoke billowing out of its punctured steel belly, weaponless for the first time in Bodhi’s memory. He doesn’t understand how Baze came to be there, or where his repeater cannon is, but those details seem inconsequential because Baze is glowing, too, even more readily than Chirrut. Flames licks at his feet when he walks, cold and blue, and the black smoke from the AT-ACT seems to cling to his jumpsuit and swirl around his calves like some kind of ethereal robe. And… he’s smiling. 

He reaches out and touches Chirrut’s cheek. “Is this not the end?” he says. Bodhi shouldn’t be able to hear him, not with the distance and the deafening roar of the burning AT-ACT, but somehow each word is as clear in his mind as the bells from the Temple that used to ring out on holy days. 

“The Whills aren’t finished with us yet.” Chirrut grabs his staff and Baze’s hand. “The ship. Come, quickly.”

The race together through the sand toward Bodhi, toward his ship. A deathtrooper lies half on the sand and half on the gangplank, killed by one of Chirrut’s shockwaves, but they step over it unerringly and Chirrut kicks him off onto the sand. A grenade rolls harmlessly out of his hand and doesn’t deploy.

“Bring her up, Bodhi,” Baze snaps. Lightning crackles in his voice and Bodhi jumps to obey, shaking with something more than fear. “We’ve got a few more pickups to make.”

Bodhi scrambles to obey, nearly falls--a blaster had clipped his leg, earlier, but he’d forgotten. Baze is already closing the hatch, seeming lighter and less weary without the tank for his repeater cannon strapped to his back, but Chirrut is there before Bodhi can hit the ground, catching his arm. He helps him into the cockpit and pauses there, silvery eyes focused somewhere just past Bodhi’s shoulder.

“We’re going to get out of this alive,” Chirrut tells him, perfectly steady. His voice sounds like thunder to Bodhi’s ears, but he doesn’t quail from his touch like he would have twenty-four hours ago. “Come, before the Empire decides to cut its losses and blow us all sky-high.”

He stays with him in the cockpit as Bodhi fires up the engine and pulls into the sky. He flies low, fearing a blast of friendly fire in their stolen vessel, but the rebels must know the number painted on their tail for what it is. Rogue One finds her bearings, finds the center of the island with its black spire threatening to crumble. Overhead, the Death Star lurks like a sinister moon, and as he pulls the vessel up to the top of the tower, he fancies he can see the gathering glow of hot, unfeeling fire in its depths. But Chirrut puts a hand on his shoulder as he brings them in close to the top ledge where Jyn keeps Cassian on his feet, and he breathes through it.

Bodhi is of Jedha, and he is not afraid.

**Author's Note:**

> I actually finished this quite a while ago, and I can't remember anymore where I got the word _jihunn_. The idea of a select few guardians being chosen to act as undead protectors of the Whills and the kyber temple was born from a lot of googling around about chinese monsters, but are not actually based on any one legend in particular.


End file.
